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Author: Tony Georgiev

Recently the Alexa Word Chain game got an upgrade – a global leaderboard where everyone that makes a good game in competitive mode can enter and compete against other players. The leaderboard can be found here http://word-chain.com/

I am very curious how this will turn out, will the GUI fit as a nice addition to the VUI of Alexa, or will it be too much of overhead for the Alexa users. Time will tell.

A recent new feature in Good Vibe, called Web Text-2-Speech allows it’s users to link the response of their commands to web content. This can be anything from a file or wikipedia article, to news item or weather report. Unfortunately not all sites are supported, the content of the website needs to be structured with main article sections, in order for a proper parsing of the site. Behind the scenes it is using a mix of custom code and the great tool https://github.com/ageitgey/node-unfluff for parsing the content.

To give more insights I am starting to write up integration tutorials. By popular demand of Good Vibe’s users we are starting with Dropbox and iTextPad

While developing my other Alexa skill, Good Vibe, it got me thinking how a classical word game that we have played in our childhood can fit nicely with Alexa’s VUI. This is how the idea of Word Chain was born.

VMware’s Clarity provides very nice and clean styles to typical HMTL components. In this topic we will focus only the CSS section of Clarity that can be used with vanilla JS, without the Angular components. It suits well if you want a common look and feel across your site or app, similarly to Twitter’s Bootstrap. Now there is small problem, the range of components the CSS covers is a lot, and even minified it is ~770KB. But for a small and medium websites most likely you would use just a fraction of what the whole library can provide. Read More

I am happy to announce that very recently I released my first skill for Amazon Alexa called “Good Vibe“. It’s one project that I built from an idea to it’s current state for about a month in my free hours after work. I definitely learned a lot of things in my effort to create a public service like it, and I would like to cover the highlights for it.

The idea

The idea came very recently after I bought an Amazon Echo device, I was looking for a similar skill that I can program how to respond with text or audio on specific queries. I wanted to get my hands dirty on developing a skill for Alexa.